Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, CBE (15 May 1926 – 6 June 2016) was an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, of which several have been turned into films.
The devil isn't made by what Mommy says or what Daddy says. The devil is there.
Look. . . to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little.
Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him. . . he never bores me, and he doesn't. . . not only bore me, that's too strong a word.
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills- like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.
The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him!. . . My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.